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During the past
half-century a notable change has taken place in Scottish rural
life and habits. In former times, before the days of railways,
and the advance of machinery and the introduction of the new system of
free education and local government, there were many sources of rural
occupation, and, in spite of bad sanitation, and in education nothing
but the three R’s, more contentment and simplicity were common than is
general among the present well-instructed generation. The old Scots
tongue is becoming obsolete in the lowlands, and it is even beginning to
be considered a mark of vulgarity to use the broad Doric accent and the
expressive old words and phrases so dear to a former generation.
Music-hall doggerel often takes the place of the beautiful old Scottish
melodies at popular entertainments, and the good and
once paramount influence of the Kirk has considerably declined. The
tendency of recent legislation has been to undermine the old Scottish
aspiration to thrift and manly independence, and in some of the lower
strata of society it is becoming commoner every year for the individual
to follow the Irish method and look to the Government for some kind of
support all the way from the cradle to the grave, instead of struggling
resolutely onwards and relying on strenuous personal effort to build up
a solid character and a useful career in life. The more strenuous or
independent-minded young men, of whom happily there are many, often
prefer to emigrate to Canada to push their fortunes in a land where
there is felt to be less State interference and where, if- there is
perhaps more risk to life and limb, there is also more personal liberty
for the subject.
While this is so, it is also equally certain that the public health has
improved, and the level of social life has greatly risen, and if
taxation is heavier, there is also more ability to bear it. The general
well-being of the people has steadily advanced during the last quarter
of a century. While the rich have grown richer, pauperism has diminished
enormously, independently of old-age pensions, which only affect a
comparatively small proportion of all the recipients of public relief.
The proportion of persons in receipt of parochial relief reached its
maximum in 1868, when there were in Scotland (excluding lunatics) 40
paupers per 1,000 of the whole population. In 1912 this figure dwindled
down to 19, or less than half. In some rural parishes the diminution in
pauperism has been twice as great as this, and, indeed, cases of extreme
poverty and social misery exist mainly in the slums of Glasgow and other
congested cities and not in the country villages and towns, and these,
when considered along with the rest, materially raise the general
average.
Social ameliorations: diminution of poverty.
While the general well-being of the community is thus improving, the
amount of crime of various sorts has at the same time greatly
diminished, particularly since 1907.
Diminution in crime.
In 1912, although there was more-crime and drunkenness than in 1911,
there were fewer sentences to penal servitude than in any year since
1906, and there was no capital sentence at all. This general diminution
in crime is ascribed mainly to the growth of temperance, the gradual
substitution of tea for whisky and beer as a beverage, and to the
influence of counter, attractions to the public-house. Among these must
be counted kinematograph exhibitions established in most towns, to the
great advantage of their owners in the first place, no doubt, but also
to that of the general public in the second.
In the county of West Lothian, for example, where the population is of a
mixed character, partly engaged in agriculture and partly in mining and
other industries, the number of convictions for crime for the year 1907
was 2,032, while in 1912 it had fallen to 1,258. In 1913 the number 'of
convictions rose to 1,419, and the police authorities attribute the
increase in crime to the exceptionally high wages that prevailed
throughout the year.
During this period there was a steady increase in the industrial
population, which at the census of 1911 was 80,155.
Scots country-folk are peaceable and law-abiding, and most of the local
crime consists of trivial offences.
During the great coal strike in 1894, which lasted for seventeen weeks,
and the national five weeks’ strike in 1912, there was little or no
rioting or disorder such as was common in Wales and some parts of
England during the labour disputes. The drunken and disorderly element
largely consists of casual and Irish immigrants and habitual tramps, who
form a bad, if small, social ingredient in some rural and all industrial
communities.
Two-thirds of the population of Scotland inhabit the Distribu-industrial
belt between the Forth and the Clyde, where p°pul°af_ all the more
important coal-fields are situated. Outside tion. this carboniferous
area the main industry is agriculture, with fishing along the coasts and
shipping at a few large seaports. Besides its shipping, Dundee has for
long been the centre of a large jute industry, independent of the
natural resources of the ground. In recent years another new source of
occupation, also independent of coal, has been opened up at Foyers and
Kinlochleven in Inverness-shire. The abundant rainfall in that moist
region has been impounded in an immense reservoir high up among the
mountains of Lochaber, and the energy of the water in its descent to
sea-level has been transformed into electricity, and thus used in the
manufacture of large quantities of aluminium. This is perhaps but the
beginning of a future source of rural occupation of great importance to
parts of Scotland where there are no other natural resources to maintain
a considerable population. A large seam of ironstone has lately been
discovered and is being mined in the remote island of Raasay off Skye,
and this, too, will give fresh employment to a poor local population.
While there are thus prospects of better employment in some places where
the climate is bad and the natural resources are small, there are large
districts of declining population where the old cottage industries have
been destroyed, and almost nothing but agriculture is left as a source
of rural livelihood. Li the earlier part of the nineteenth century,
there were multitudes of meal and flour mills along all the lowland
rivers, there were watermills for linen, forges worked by water-power,
spinning, weaving, and nail-making at home, and now nearly all these
home industries are gone, and most of the mills are marked by heaps of
ruins covered with moss and overgrown with docks and nettles. Coopering,
candle-making, basket-making, tambouring, and thatching were likewise
old village industries that have disappeared, leaving little or nothing
to take their place. No doubt there are large hotels for tourists, and
golf-links requiring some caddies and keepers, but these are not
producers of anything really useful, nor do they maintain a large and
steadily industrious population.
Decline in rural industry.
The mainstay of the lowland districts outside the more exclusively
mineral areas is agriculture, and in recent years this industry has been
quite prosperous. While politicians are in the habit of citing the
miserable existence and the low wages of agricultural labourers in
England and Ireland, very little is heard about the condition of farmers
and their workpeople in central Scotland, where, in spite of good rents,
there is neither poverty nor discontent. The case of Scotland, and
especially the Lothian district, deserves to be stated by an
unprejudiced observer unaffected by the din of party politics, as it
exemplifies the need and the result of individual character, energy, and
brains in developing any cultivable bit of land, whether it be in
Midlothian or Manitoba. It is these personal qualities steadily applied
for the last 150 years that have reclaimed vast quaking bogs and stony
wildernesses, covered them with farms and made the desert places to
blossom like the rose, without the help of legislation or any special
virtue in the soil, and have placed Scottish agriculture far ahead of
that of Ireland and many parts of England, where the soil is equally
good and the climate better. It is not Acts of Parliament, but the
application of sound brains and dogged energy that is really wanted to
make the land yield its best fruits for the use of man.
The extreme depression that began in the early seventies Prosperity and
continued for over thirty years has gradually disappeared, and the
prospects of British farming are now quite favourable. The rise in
prices of fat stock and cereals, and the growing efficiency of modern
agricultural methods and labour-saving appliances, have made good farms
much sought after. Whenever a farm becomes vacant, there are perhaps a
dozen or a score of applicants for it from every quarter, sometimes even
from Canada.
Farm labourers’ wages have automatically increased Farm wages as skilled
men are becoming scarce, and, indeed, capable sociai men can hardly be
obtained at some places owing to condition, emigration, small families,
and not enough apprentice boys learning to plough and handle horses.
Good horsemen and cattlemen in the Lothians get 22.s. a week, plus free
house and other perquisites; they have no rates to pay, and their whole
earnings may be taken at a week, about double the pay of less efficient
men in some parts of England and Ireland. They work, as a rule, six days
a week and have to attend to the milking of cows and feeding of cattle
and horses and other necessary light work on Sim days. There is thus no
regular weekly half-holiday and but little time to spend money 011
amusements. On this modest income the married men manage to bring up
good families in decency and comfort, and there is not any poverty or
discontent among them. When there is illness, the farmers’ habit has
been to allow them six weeks’ full pay, and in nine cases out of ten the
recovery takes place long before that interval has elapsed. But when the
Insurance Act came into force this kindly relationship was in some cases
strained. It appeared, as the farmers had in many cases anticipated,
that there was no need of including this very healthy class among the
insured at all, as by the kindly old system the rare cases of sickness
were met in a far better way than by the Act.
While there is no regular weekly half-holiday, farmers often let their
men off half a day or a whole day when work is not pressing. But when in
one field on a Saturday afternoon a football match is perhaps going on
in a mining district, and in the next a ploughman is drawing his lone
furrow, it is natural for one of the players or more likely for one of
the onlookers, who, by the way, never works more than eleven days a
fortnight, to shout over the fence an invitation to the man of industry
to leave off his monotonous job and join the crowd of pleasure-seekers.
It. is natural that he should sometimes wish to accept the rough
invitation, and, indeed, in some districts an agitation for a weekly
half-holiday for farm labourers has lately begun, especially in the
northern counties and in districts where the old bothy system prevails.
J11 these localities, instead of married men with cottages, single men
are largely employed and lodged in 4 bothies ’ where the social
conditions are unfavourable, and existence is dull and depressing. In
such districts farm servants are often migratory, and largely outside
religious influences, and there is much room for improvement in their
social condition. So far as holidays are concerned, the difficulty, from
the farmer’s point of view, is that, however much he may sympathize with
the idea, agricultural work depends for its success so largely on
weather that it would be often a very great loss to him to let all his
men off on some regular specified day that might be the very time when
there was most need of them all to be at work on the land. The most
discontented people are often those with the largest wages and the most
holidays, and it has often been remarked that when a married ploughman
flits, it takes a couple of good carts to carry his household goods to
the next farm, but when a miner, with twice his pay, has to move, as he
often does, a wheelbarrow or two is often all he needs.
The proposal to create small holdings, either for owners Small or
tenants, does not find much favour among practical men, at least in
central Scotland. The main reason is ticable. that land alone does not
pay to cultivate in lots of less than about 60 to 100 acres, and
market-gardening is only profitable near large towns. Ploughing requires
a pair of horses, and 60 acres is what a pair of horses require to work
advantageously. There is a great demand for farms of over 100 acres, but
smaller farms are generally given up after a time unless the owner has
some auxiliary occupation, such as fishing or letting his house to
summer visitors. In former times there were many small-holders in some
districts, especially near towns and collieries, where much carting had
to be done. The carting was the auxiliary trade that kept the
smallholder in funds, and when railways were introduced or pits became
exhausted, the holdings had to be given up, and became merged in larger
farms. Except in the neighbourhood of cities or places where there is a
ready market, and where manure is easily obtained, or other occupation
is available, there is no probability of smaller holdings than 100 acres
ever becoming an economic success.
Another reason why small holdings have become more impracticable than
ever is the cost of erecting the necessary buildings, and perhaps the
introduction of a water-supply and drainage. With the rise in the price
of materials of all kinds and the increase in tradesmen’s wages and
local rates, house-building has become nearly 50 per cent, dearer than
it was twenty years ago, and house rents have not risen in the same
proportion. It is thus impossible, even if it were otherwise advisable,
to do more than the minimum amount of building on a farm that is to
yield an economic return to the proprietor. Recent legislation has
closed many old cottages, and discouraged the building of new ones.
Proprietors who can afford to develop their estates have, until
recently, greatly improved many of the cottages and farm buildings. In
Scotland the tenant of a cottage prefers a bed in the kitchen near the
fire, and cottages are always built with this in view. The English
system of a living-room and several very small bedrooms, often without a
fire, is not in favour north of the Tweed. The better class of workmen’s
dwelling has a kitchen with a bed and one or two rooms, or perhaps
three, one of which will probably be used as a parlour without a bed.
Houses of this kind are being built on many estates and the damp old ‘
but and ben ’ is gradually being eliminated. Landlords have long
recognized the principle lately enunciated by politicians, that part of
the rent should be returned in improvements. Indeed, in some places the
taxes and improvements, especially at the beginning of a new lease,
absorb not a part, but the whole of the rent for several years to come.
Each room in the cheapest class of cottage costs at least £50, and it is
hardly possible to build a house with four apartments and conveniences
for less than £200. At 6 per cent, the gross rent would be £12, which is
more than labourers can generally afford. Oif this has to be deducted
the repairs and the taxes, so that the proprietor can hope for very
little net return on his outlay. The farm cottages, however, are
generally included in the lease and free of rent to the labourer, who
gets his house, however much or little it has cost, as part of his
ordinary remuneration.
In many parts of the Highlands and the Western Conditions Islands, the
land is so poor and the climate so wet, that jands^1' it can seldom he
made to yield a decent livelihood and support people who wish to live
according to the advanced social ideas of the present day. The barren
crystalline rocks of that picturesque region have generally a scanty
covering of the poorest class of soil, and this elementary fact appears
to be often overlooked by well-meaning but ignorant social reformers.
Life in such places is, and always has been, a constant Value of waste
of energy and a struggle against ever-recurring periods of distress and
starvation. Agriculture of a remunerative sort is there almost
impossible, and what is mainly wanted is wholesale emigration to Canada,
except in places where new industries, such as have been already
mentioned, can be established, or where there is good fishing or the
possibility of fructifying showers of summer visitors. The writer is
well acquainted with these wild abodes of his hungry ancestors, and has
visited Nova Scotia and met Canadians whose grandfathers were sent out
by the so-called cruel landlords a century ago from such congested
areas. They have declared that these old ‘ clearings 5 were really the
greatest blessings that ever befell their families, and not one of them
dreamt of returning to starve amid the barren wilds and peatbogs of
Sutherland, Ross, or the Outer Hebrides, unless perhaps they may have
made independent fortunes, and come back to buy residential estates for
sporting purposes or sentimental reasons.
The mining class is a large one in central Scotland, Mining where coal,
ironstone, and oil-shale are produced in great quantities. Mines and oil
works have had a period of wages, prosperity, in which the workers have
all shared, and the average weekly wages of the pitmen has been over £2.
Some miners have been earning more than 10.s. a day, and allowing for
many holidays, the actual sum paid in wages has often been over £130 a
year. With perhaps two or three unmarried sons working, a family can
have a joint income of £400 or more. With such a revenue coming in and
no income-tax to pay, it might be expected that a miner would prefer to
occupy a house commensurate with his means. But that is unhappily the
exception. However large the pay, the inveterate habit is to live in a
house with a kitchen containing a bed, and one or at most two bedrooms
with sleeping accommodation for the rest of the family. Here the Scot
compares most disadvantageously with his more home-loving English
comrade. It is truly a deplorable state of matters that a man whose
family income is equal to or better than that of many a clergyman or
doctor should persist in refusing to pay a yearly rent of more than £8
or £10 for his house. The cheap and bad housing known to exist in many
of the older mining villages, for which colliery owners are often
blamed, is partly due to the refusal of their occupiers to pay for
better accommodation, or to build good cottages for themselves in spite
of the means and the inducement that is often given them to do so. The
greater part of the income, instead of being given to the housewife, is
wasted on whippet racing, football exhibitions, trips, picture houses,
betting, or on drink, although happily not so much on the last score as
formerly.
The miners work not more than eleven days a fortnight, and sometimes
only ten, and have fully two weeks of holidays, besides many others
taken at odd intervals, and thus they have much spare time for amusement
during the year. They go underground about 7 a.m., and are home before
four o’clock, as a rule, when on the day shift. With so much spare time,
there is ample room for physical or mental culture, but few of them take
much advantage of these golden opportunities, or interest themselves in
gardening or self-improvement. There are, of course, some exceptions
where men are provident and build cottages for themselves, and in some
of the newer mining districts, especially in Fife and Stirlingshire,
attempts are being made to lay out tidy villages on the garden-city
principle. In a perfectly new district, where there are no old
traditions or inveterate habits to overcome, and where the tenants can
be selected from the beginning, these excellent plans may be attended
with success.
Co-operative stores are an important and growing Co-opera-institution in
most industrial centres in Scotland, and are tlon' the means of
promoting a great deal of thrift among the operatives. Co-operation,
however, 011 the democratic basis, is not an unmixed blessing. The
stores are managed by a committee of the shareholders, who, as a ride,
have had 110 previous business training, and do not believe in injuring
the dividend by paying more wages to their own employees than they can
help. The management is thus often sadly troubled with the incapacity or
dishonesty of underpaid and overworked servants entrusted with the daily
handling of much ready-money and goods of great value, and these
officials, even if perfectly trustworthy, often complain privately about
the tyranny of their employers, and contrast them with ordinary business
men in private firms, to the great disadvantage of the former. It is
also a public grievance that these wealthy societies, really limited
companies making handsome profits, pay no income-tax, because it is
presumed by the State that none of the individual shareholders are
liable. Another and very natural grievance is that while the societies
are thus exempt they displace many individual shopkeepers, who would all
have to pay the tax, and thus deprive the State of an important source
of revenue.
One of the redeeming features of the somewhat grey Music, life in
Scottish mining villages is the instrumental band and the love of music
it promotes. Each district has a brass, or more often in these
prosperous times, a silver band, with a full set of instruments, worth
perhaps as much as £400, and great interest is taken in the
performances. Rand contests between different districts draw almost as
large crowds as football matches, and the judges have on occasion been
as roughly handled as football referees by the disappointed competitors.
These instruments are often presented by the local employer or some
other popular magnate, and their maintenance and the extensive
practisings for the contests and public performances involve the
collection of many local subscriptions.
Pipe bands are much more easily maintained, and have become far commoner
than they were twenty years ago. Bagpipe playing, indeed, all over
Scotland is steadily increasing in popularity. The old game of quoiting
is also a favourite and innocent pastime in many mining villages.
The local government in rural places is mainly conducted by the County
and Parish Councils, ond by the School Board. The County Councils,
established in 1889, took over the management of the roads and public
health where there was no municipality. The Local Government Act of 1889
was subsequently amended, and the County Council empowered to create a
very useful substitute for a municipality in the more populous rural
centres. Many small police burghs have come to exist unnecessarily in
small villages, and were originated at a time when lighting and
scavenging could not be carried out efficiently without setting up the
whole municipal paraphernalia. But now, with great advantage to the
community, the district committees of the County Council may form
separate small lighting, scavenging, and water districts without
incurring the trouble and cost of a miniature local municipality. Such
areas are managed very quietly and efficiently by small committees, with
the aid of the regular county officials, and, indeed, some populous
villages or small towns prefer to be governed in this extremely
efficient but highly economical and simple manner.
The County Council superseded the old and highly-rcspectablc body, the
Commissioners of Supply, who previous to 1889 held office by virtue of a
considerable property qualification in the county. The more democratic
county councillors require to be elected, but since many of the old
Commissioners of Supply, who were really resident lairds, found it
convenient to continue to gh e the public the benefit of their services
and their business experience, it generally happened that the most
capable of their number were elected to the new Comity Councils along
with other estimable local representatives, not necessarily men of
property. The County Council personnel is thus of fairlv high class, and
is drawn from a large area, including all the sections of the community
that have their own time at their disposal. The county business is
generally transacted in an unostentatious and very efficient manner.
Peers of the realm, landlords or their factors, farmers, local
solicitors, managers of works, merchants, retired business men or
independent tradesmen make up the bulk of the representation.
The personnel of the Parish Council is of a more humble Parish order.
The parish being a smaller area, the choice of capable and willing
members is more limited. The meetings are often held at night, when
working men can attend regularly and when business men wish to be at
home, and the result is that in some parishes the social status has
gradually deteriorated, until the councillors have been largely drawn
from the same class as the paupers to whom they give relief. This
unhappy state of matters is most noticeable in Glasgow and the larger
centres, where men of respectability can hardly be induced to undertake
the dismal work of parochial relief, and to serve alongside of the kind
of people, often of socialistic leanings, who are interested in
obtaining seats. In the purely rural districts, however, the Councils
contain a large admixture of farmers, clergymen, schoolmasters, and
people of weight and respectability in the parish.
While pauperism, as has been mentioned, has notably Lunacy decreased all
over Scotland during the last forty-six -Boaids-years, lunacy, or as it
is now to be called, mental deficiency, has continued slowly and
steadily to grow relatively to the population. The asylums are managed
by Boards, most of which are composed of representatives from the County
Councils, but some by Boards made up of Urban Parish Councillors
exclusively. Under the Mental Deficiency Act, in force from the year
1914, Lunacy Boards have an increased scope, and the new and not very
attractive title, "Boards of Control", is given to them. The Boards that
were exclusively composed of County Councillors have one-third of their
numbers elected by the Parish Councils, except in the seven large urban
areas where the Parish Council is already the Board. The latter class of
Lunacy Board, with its inferior personnel, has not been eminently
successful hi its business and administrative methods, and it remains to
be seen how the new system will work out in practice.
Education has always been a strong feature in Scottish national life,
and the School Board naturally occupies a more conspicuous place in the
public eye than the Parish Council. The Parish Council, however, has to
do with the School Board in one important respect : the education rate
is levied by the Parish Council along with the poor’s rate. The School
Board annually asks for a certain sum, and has not the trouble or odium
of raising it. While the poor’s rate may be stationary, the school rate
is ever growing, and at the same time public discontent with the
Education Department is constantly expressed by School Board members,
teachers, and ratepayers.
The grounds on which this dissatisfaction is expressed appear to be
concerned mainly with the autocratic way in which the Department often
orders what it is thought proper to impose for the time being, under
pain of withholding the government grant. This is the cause of deep
resentment all over the country. The religious question gives no trouble
as a rule, the people being nearly all Presbyterians. The trouble arises
largely from what is considered the extravagance that the Department
demands in equipment and buildings, and its insistence on the vain
attempt to teach too many things in the primary schools, without really
educating the children thoroughly in the most important elementary
subjects, such as history, geography, and the three R’s. The teachers
complain of too small salaries, although these are constantly being
improved, and of the cost and trouble they endure on account of having
new subjects added by the Department, often for but a short time, to the
curriculum they have to teach. The increasing cost of living renders
higher remuneration necessary in this as in other professions, no doubt,
but the ratepayers think, as education is more a national than a local
matter, and the expensive-minded Department is beyond their control, the
additional cost should be provided by increased grants rather than by
higher rates.
No review of Scottish rural life would be complete without some
reference to the Kirk, and to the present interesting and instructive
ecclesiastical condition of the country. To explain concisely the state
of matters in 1914 and write an intelligible review of the whole
situation in a few paragraphs is a matter of no small difficulty.
It must be remembered that the old Roman Catholic Church was
particularly corrupt in Scotland, and under the profound influence of
John Knox and the early Protestant divines the reformation was very
thorough, especially in the lowlands, and in later times
Presbyterian-ism became and has remained deeply rooted in the national
life of a perfervid race, and no amount of subsequent persuasion and
persecution has been able to eradicate the idea of freedom from
priestcraft and State control in the Scottish Church. Episcopacy has
little or no hold on the common people, and although it has gained many
adherents among the aristocracy, its popular influence is unimportant
and not increasing.
In the eighteenth century and the first half of the nine- Cause of
teenth the increasing interference of the State through ,Cieces910ns-the
law courts led to numerous secessions from the Establishment, mainly due
to the abuse of patronage in the appointment of ministers. These smaller
secessions were followed by the famous Disruption of 1843, when the
great majority of the more active and evangelical ministers and the most
liberal of the laymen left the Establishment in a body and formed the
Free Church.
Before 1845 the poor were provided for by voluntary church-door
collections in each parish, but when the Establishment was depleted by
the exodus of its best givers, whose liberality was henceforth to be
expended on the new Free Churches, these charitable collections, never
too large, fell off and disappeared in many parishes, and so this method
became totally inadequate for parochial relief. The sum required has
thus to be provided by taxation, and thus the Poor Law came into force
in 1845, when Parochial Boards were established, to be superseded in
half a century by the Parish Councils.
At the Disruption, religious enthusiasm and public feeling as well as
party spirit ran high, and it has taken two generations to mollify the
bitterness between the disrupted members of the Scottish Church. But a
new generation has now arisen with wider views of Christian duty and
Church unity, and the irreconcilables are gradually dying out or
modifying their early and somewhat fanatical opinions.
The older dissenting Churches, it must be explained, did not join the
Free Church in 1843, but stood aloof and united soon afterwards with one
another to form the United Presbyterian Church, politically a radical
body opposed to the very idea of a Church established and endowed by the
State. The original Free Church members, and Dr. Thomas Chalmers their
great leader, were all at first strong establishment men and had no wish
to join the so-called 1 voluntaries ’ and suddenly abandon the idea of a
national State Church. But although Erastians in theory they were
voluntaries in practice, and as time went on they or their children
began to realize their duty better and gradually became more friendly to
the United Presbyterians. Finally, in 1900 the two Churches joined
forces under the name of the United Free Church, about equal in size,
and far more than equal in liberality to the Established Church. But
here a strange and very unhappy event took place that has produced
immense heart-burning and hardship to many good people.
There was in the old Free Church a small and dwindling but recalcitrant
minority chiefly composed of ultra-conservative Highlanders who refused
to come into any union with United Presbyterians and voluntaries, and
stoutly upheld the Establishment principle as a fundamental part of the
Church’s doctrine.
They raised a civil action in which they claimed for themselves all the
property and funds of the old Free Church.
This claim was unanimously refused in the Scottish law courts, but on
appealing to the House of Lords in 1904, it was upheld by the English
Lord Chancellor and by a bare majority of his colleagues. The legal Free
Church of the "Wee Free", as it was nicknamed in derision, a body of
about twenty-seven ministers, mainly Gaelic speakers, and some 2,000
church members, mostly in obscure charges in remote northern parishes,
was thus served heir to the colleges, church offices, and buildings of
about 1,000 congregations, and to the endowments that the Free Church
had accumulated in 60 years to the sum of over £1,000,000, and was made
trustee of an immense heritage that it was ludicrously unfit to
administer.
So absurd and unjust was the situation created by the Church House of
Lords that an Act of Parliament was hastily passed in 1905 practically
to reverse the decision, and 1905-a Commission was appointed to make
investigations and hand over to the United Free Church all that the
legal Free Church was found incapable of administering. As matters now
stand the legal Free Church has still more property than it can handle
satisfactorily, and there is considerable need of another Commission to
relieve it of the misapplied surplus. This reactionary little
denomination is dwindling in numbers and influence. ‘ Human ’ hymns and
instrumental music are severely prohibited in its services, and its
ministers are largely occupied in lamenting the decadence of this evil
generation and the disappearance of true religion from the land since
1843.
Curiously enough, although the legal Free Church bunion abhors the
disestablishment agitation and upholds the between Establishment
principle as one of its fundamental tenets, lished and it has no desire
to return to the bosom of the existing United State Church, which it
regards as thoroughly unorthodox Church and vitiated in other respects.
The proposal in this direction that is now in the air and causing much
interest in Scotland is one for a larger union, between the Church of
Scotland and the United Free Church itself. The disestablishment
agitation that was so rife a few years ago has in the meantime almost
completely subsided, and during recent years influential committees
appointed by the respective General Assemblies of the Established and
United Free Churches have been meeting together and amicably
endeavouring to discover some common basis for an incorporating union
that will meet the wishes of all moderate men and broad-minded
Christians. There are considerable obstacles in the way of such a
desirable consummation of Scottish ecclesiastical history, but the gain
would be so great that it is an object well worth striving after. The
union in 1900 has led to the closing of a large number of superfluous
churches. As numerous rural districts with a declining population have
too many churches while the more populous industrial centres have
sometimes too few, a larger union would lead to a better distribution of
ecclesiastical energy, and more economy in the organization of Christian
work. The gain would probably be greatest on the side of the State
Church, but one condition of the union would, no doubt, be that the
future Church of Scotland would no longer be the Established Church in
the present legal sense of the term, but the recognized National Church,
free from every vestige of State control in all spiritual matters. Lay
patronage, the main but not the only cause of all the secessions in the
past, was abolished in the Scottish Establishment in 1874, and in most
other respects the Scottish Presbyterian Churches, unlike the principal
Churches in England and Wales, are identical in polity, aims, and
doctrine, and friendly with one another, so that the legal, personal,
and ecclesiastical obstacles to union are not great, and indeed it is
not easy for men who are not born Scots to understand wherein all the
causes of difference are to be discovered. |
